Did the USSR ever actually achieve socialism?

No

Disgusts me more than anything seeing a bunch of know-nothing american teenagers disparage examples of actually existing socialism.

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No, but it was all worth it to get those super cool German tankie songs.

Debatable, but I don't think it did. When means of production are held by the state without a democratic running I dont feel it's even close because it closely resembles what an AnCap country would turn into once a mega monopoly would form. Only socialist thing it did was collective farming.

marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/

Arbeiter, Bauern, nehmt die Gewehre,
Nehmt die Gewehre zur Hand!

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I made some points in an earlier post here that I'd like to repeat. For one, despite this board's obsession over debating semantics, there is no such thing as an objective definition of any word. But I feel it's useful to define communism simply as the negation of capital. If this is the case, the USSR displayed a high degree of communism, if not perfectly and truly realized, just through the reality of it's state ownership.

But there was more to it than that. In truth, after 1928 the Soviet Union under Stalin began constructing a centralized-planned economy that perfectly adhered to the tradition Marxist definition of socialism. In this economy all production, under the direction of gosplan, was planned out by a network of industrial ministries. There were no exchanges in ownership between these planning bodies in labor or means of production, which were all allocated by the state. When all of society's resources are owned by one body there naturally cannot be any accumulation of capital, no capitalism.

The USSR was not a perfect society, it was a brand of Kasernenkommunismus that Marx felt was the true endgame of all his socialist opponents. But he is partly to blame, just and Lenin and Stalin are. But they are also all responsible for it's success. No thinking person can look at the USSR and find it to be devoid of any achievement. Even today populations around the world long for the old society, in China the word communism isn't tainted like it is here. I have nothing but disdain for those who claim they don't have to pick a side in the Cold War, as if you can ignore the reality that by hurting one side you empower the other. The same kind of disdain I have for Stalinists who claim the USSR was a perfectly-realized worker's democracy. With that said, this board needs a whole lot more Stalinism if it wants to be anything more than a counter-revolutionary sinkhole.

They tried but apparently normal people don't like authoritarian anything, even if it's authoritarian socialism.

if you don't pick a side you're neutral, not hurting one side you dimwit

Political neutrality is a nonsensical concept, your bruised ego won't change that.

Really, you think an attack on a pro-USSR post couldn't potentially hurt the USSR's legacy? Tell me something, do you honestly believe it's possible to hurt the West and the Eastern Bloc precisely equally? Do you really think it's was ever possible to ever see them both collapse simultaneously? If not, then you have to accept every attack made on the Soviet Union was ultimately an apology for the winning side.

No, it never even had the possibility for it in the first place, the idea was that a revolution in Russia would spread to central Europe were conditions were ripe.

That did happen, but the revolution failed, and the Bolsheviks were left with the unenviable position to industrialize Russia on their own - which would mean implementing capitalism.

We should read and take many lessons from the Bolsheviks, but we shouldn't mistake what they created as anything but state-run Capitalism - despite Stalinists/Marxist-Leninists (and certain Trotskyists) insistence that it wasn't.

marxists.org/subject/japan/tsushima/labor-certificates.htm

That's supposed to represent an American woman.

What part of "ruthless criticism of all that exists" don't you understand? The USSR failed, a failure is meant to be criticized and learnt from, get over your Red Army Choir-fetish.

Yes, but it did not stay that way and it wasn't perfect when they had socialism. It was still miles ahead of anything else that has been tried in providing for the common workers and peasants and allowing greater participation in society.

The only societies that can claim to have done better are Western imperialist nations that were already rich that 1. spreading the wealth was necessary to prevent revolution and stunt the labor movement 2. benefited from two unprecedented post-war expansions, one intense but short-lived, the other of a much longer duration.

The USSR actually did succeed in creating a prosperous society unfortunately this was steadily undermined by the restoration of capitalism in that country and the de facto abolition of central planning.

revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/BlandRestoration.pdf

If anything Lenin was more frank about the need for purges and was openly "bloodthirsty". I've never understood the need of leftcoms to appeal to Trotskyists and those anarcho-liberals influenced by Trotskyist

If anything the openly anti-Leninist anarchists are at least commendable for their honesty and superior understanding of the link between the two men. The "anti-Stalinists" just run around trying to appeal to the remnants movement (e.g. the New Left) which while far more influential ideologically then Stalinism is the West is even deader then Stalinism as a political movement.

*can plausibly claim to have done better materially
left my shitposting flag on

If anything you've just admitted the need to read Lenin, while exposing Stalin as the sycophant and spineless bureaucrat that he was.

lol what?

oh nvm

I don't see how that follows from what I said. Lenin and Stalin just had different writing styles and ways of expressing themselves, their political styles and aims were largely the same as anarchists still crying about Makhno and Kronstadt will gladly tell you.

I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of holding up Lenin as some kind of pure beacon of light and castigating Stalin as a bloodthirsty dictator. They were both "bloodthirsty" by the standards of the bourgeoisie and by those leftists overly-influenced by bourgeois democracy.

What's not clear about what I said? It's possible for something to be ideologically influential while being dead in terms of either successful or real world practice. The New Left is dead but its still far more influential then any current of the Left in mainstream society. Those movements influenced by the New Left which reached their high-point and terminal culmination in Occupy Wall Street which accomplished fuck all were even less successful in terms of advancing worker's struggle then the Stalinist influenced revolutionary movements of the 30s-60s.

One Stalinist anti-revisionist is worth ten New Left dweebs because it takes more then a casual commitment to the ideology and mainstream bourgeois society abhors it. These days you can preach socialist utopias based on pure theory in a room full of burger bourgeois without ruffling any feathers, they know that people who take that path stay within the bounds of respectability in order not to be labeled some sort of weird bloodthirsty Stalinist.

They also know that since these attempts to build a new better socialism, which in practice amounts to just trying to reinvent the wheel, is unlikely to go anywhere because of the lack of real tangible historical examples and models to base a movement towards socialism on.

State socialism. But probably not what Marx had envisioned.

Define "socialism," really.

Did the USSR prepare a kind of transitory economics/society that could, may, might, lead to a post-capitalist one given a world revolution? Absolutely. Did the USSR prepare itself to be able to take this transition itself? Out of the question.

No.

Read the first image, wages in the USSR were on a par with West Germany in the 60s and 7th place worldwide. That is a high-level of achievement that even most bourgeois economists would consider to fall in the "prosperous" category indeed it was generally considered a developed country and a super-power prior to 1989.

And Russia was a very poor and backward country that suffered through multiple demographically and economically devastating wars in the 20th century. It had the highest sustained growth over a long period in the world bar Japan and that second place can largely be attributed to the slowdown in growth caused by Khrushchev-Brezhnev policies.

*forgot to mention that the Soviet Union also had a much larger population then most Western European countries.

Guess why Lada could produce the copy of a rejected Italian car design up until the end of the USSR. (And if you managed to buy a brand new car, you were offered more money than you paid for it at the state car dealer right outside the store gate.)

So the revisionist approach to socialism led to massive problems what else is new? It was the Leninist approach to socialist construction that made the country into an economic power house. Are you expecting me to defend revisionist era policies or something?

As a common Russian saying goes: "Stalin found Russia a wreck and left it a super-power, Gorbachev found Russia a super-power and left it a wreck."

What the revisionist leadership effectively did is restore capitalism although they didn't do it openly and all at once. Once people were tired of fake "socialism" they held out the carrot of Sweden-style capitalism and gave them full-on mad max hk cage house style capitalism.

Honestly though most of the posters on this board despite all the smarter-than-thou posturing would do worse at running the country if they were put in power then even the revisionists and Stalin left them with the second largest economy in the world to tinker with!

Comparing with Western Germany in the 60s is stupid, barely any time since the war and Germany got the worst of it.

Yea its not like the USSR also got the war on its soil, had to employ a scorched earth tactic and lost 14% of its population to the war.

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You were doing that by bringing up "muh 60s"

Also:

I criticized the USSR in my posts, a detail you chose to overlook. My point was that any criticism of the Soviet legacy's failure should also help build on it's success as tearing it down is effectively the same as tearing down communism.

15+ years is not 'barely any time', plus West Germany got a ton of help from the US.

10/10 meme

Only for a brief time during its initial existence in the form of farm co-ops.

It's possible that a country can live off the economic base and model that its predecessors built up. This happens with even many bourgeois politicians and regimes for instance the United States was living off the prosperity resulting from the policies of the Roosevelt-Truman administration in the depression and WWII during the late 50s and 60s. In fact, most bourgeois politicians usually benefit from the economic policies set by their predecessors in some way.

I just posted that image to give people an idea of what was achieved in the Soviet Union in wage terms not to praise the 60s.

Stalin was following Lenin's ideas and building onto of what he'd already built so I don't see the contradiction. I didn't invent that saying.

It was doing pretty well until the late 1920s.

Yes
marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/
/thread

Yes, under Stalin. Was is perfect? No. But then again Socialism is not a magic spell that you cast and all your problems disappear. Was the USSR better than a potential capitalist Russia if 1917 failed and the liberals took power? It sure as fuck was, even in its late degenerate state in the 80s.

How can you even say that?